Marengo pediatrician recognized by World Health Organization for work with displaced children, vaccine outreach

Dr. Errol R. Alden, a pediatrician and longtime Marengo resident, was awarded one of the World Health Organization’s most prestigious prizes this year for his accomplishments in decreasing the morbidity rate of home births in developing countries and shaping the standard of care for displaced children across the world.

Alden officially was presented with the Ihsan Doğramacı Family Health Foundation Prize in November after receiving the award in the spring. Every few years, the prize is given to a person or group of people globally recognized for their service in the area of family health.

Alden said it typically is presented during an elaborate ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, where the WHO’s headquarters is located, but the ceremony was held virtually this year.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has further laid bare deep-rooted inequities and magnified the soul-crushing medical, social and economic consequences, making the lives of refugee children much worse, threatening their families and caretakers, and serving to make our work all the more vital so that these children not only survive the pandemic, but survive in a world worth living in,” Alden said in his acceptance speech.

Alden said he was both pleased and surprised to have been honored with the award, but he attributed his recognition to the teams he was a part of over the years.

Alden, who has held many roles throughout his career, is now 79 and happily retired, living on a farm in Marengo with his wife, Judi. They have three biological sons, two adopted daughters and 17 grandchildren. The couple also took in 13 foster children over the years.

Well before Alden served as president of the International Pediatric Association or began traveling the world to care for displaced children, before he decided to specialize in pediatrics or even entered the medical field, he spent most of his early life on a dairy farm in Ohio.

When he went off to college at Ohio State University, he planned to study dairy science to become a farmer like his father. Ultimately, he went on to graduate from medical school at Ohio State in 1966 and became a practicing pediatrician in 1969.

Beyond his knack for working with kids, Alden said he was drawn to pediatrics early on in medical school because it felt like an area where his work would be especially impactful.

“I thoroughly enjoyed pediatrics both because I really enjoy working with children and also because it’s kind of a group support,” he said. “Everybody is helping out and going in the right direction.

“With children, you’ve got a lifetime ahead of them. So doing some good things at that time can make a huge difference.”

By the time he graduated from medical school, all of Alden’s friends were being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, so he said it felt right to begin his training in pediatrics with the military. He served with the U.S. military for the next 25 years, first as a pediatrician and, later, as a neonatologist, or a pediatrician specialized in the care of premature newborn babies.

He rose through the ranks to become the chairman of pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University and also served as chief of pediatrics at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.

In 1987, Alden was recruited to become director of education at the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is based in Itasca. It was then that Alden drove west along Route 90 looking for some open space on which to settle with his family and found Marengo, which reminded him of his first home on Ohio farmland.

He and his wife, Judi, bought a good stretch of land and a few animals and participated in McHenry County 4-H fairs with their children. Alden said they enjoy connecting with their community through the Marengo United Methodist Church.

Although Alden lives locally, he always has had a medical practice that stretches across the globe. Throughout his career, he traveled frequently, exchanging knowledge and training with teams of pediatricians throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Alden helped design a neonatal resuscitation program to care for the estimated 10% of newborn babies who need help starting to breath when they first leave the womb. This program quickly spread across the U.S. and then to other countries.

“China says that it was that program – and they redid it with their expertise and called it ‘the first breath of life’ – that dropped their neonatal mortality by 50%, so it was very effective,” Alden said.

But the program was designed to train medical professionals in a hospital birth setting and gave no help to the millions of babies born in home births across the world, whom are prone to higher neonatal mortality rates.

So in 2006, Alden led the adoption of the National Resuscitation Program into “Helping Babies Breathe,” a new version of the protocols modified to be more accessible to people of varying literacy levels.

“When we started, it was only physicians who were supposed to be doing resuscitation, and if you wait until the physician gets there it’s far too late. So by training midwives or by training somebody who was there at the time, it has made a huge difference around the world,” Alden said.

The program is estimated to have lowered the neonatal mortality rate of home births in Tanzania by 47%.

It was through this program that Alden said he began working with children displaced by wars and natural disasters, studying how this trauma might affect their development and what could be done to give them a fair chance at a healthy life. He worked primarily with Syrian refugee children across the Middle East.

“We live by this slogan that the only proven effective method for the advancement of civilization is the care and education of our children,” he said.

Alden served as executive director and CEO of the American Academy of Pediatrics from 2004 to 2015 before retiring.

Shortly after retiring, Alden was chosen as president-elect of the International Pediatric Association, a global partnership that, according to its mission statement, “exists to create a world where all children, regardless of age, location or family situation, can live healthy lives.”

He now is serving as president of the organization and will finish his term in May.

When Alden was awarded the Ihsan Doğramacı Family Health Foundation Prize in the spring, he also was recognized for his work addressing the hesitancy and misinformation around vaccines, according to a recent news release.

Alden remembers growing up in the 1950s during the polio epidemic, when he and his friends were kept home by their parents for periods of time for fear that they might catch the disease. He said he marveled at the power of vaccines in erasing illness – first polio, and then chicken pox, the measles and mumps, rubella and rubeola.

Now, a younger generation with less direct ties to this era has invited in a new wave of immunization hesitancy, which came to a peak around the vaccine for COVID-19. According to a November Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they would not get the vaccine.

Alden said he will continue his outreach work through the International Pediatrics Association to root out misinformation and raise awareness about the importance of vaccinating children and people of all ages. He sees the coronavirus pandemic as he sees the world – ripe with inequities that must be addressed in order to move forward together.

“Together, we have an unprecedented opportunity to tear down broken systems and structures and remake the world – and its health systems – so that every child can grow up to be healthy and have a bright future,” Alden said in his speech.